09/06/2026
The Unintended Consequences of Lindsay Clancy
There is a question hanging over the Lindsay Clancy case that has almost nothing to do with whether she is ultimately convicted, acquitted or found not criminally responsible. It isn’t really about Massachusetts, either, because what happens after this case could reach family courts all over the country.
We’ve spent years telling new mothers to speak up when something doesn’t feel right. Tell your husband, tell your doctor, tell your therapist, answer the postpartum screening questions honestly and get help when you need it.
That’s exactly what women should do, and nobody should be arguing otherwise. The problem is that America also has an adversarial family-court system where divorcing parents routinely dig through each other’s worst moments looking for ammunition, and suddenly your therapist’s office starts looking less like a safe place and more like the evidence room on Law & Order.
Something said during the most vulnerable period of a woman’s life can sound very different when it’s pulled out of a medical record years later. Lindsay Clancy may have just given every as***le looking for an advantage in a custody fight one hell of a cultural reference point.
This doesn’t require some nationwide conspiracy against mothers, and it doesn’t require judges to intentionally misunderstand postpartum mental health. It only requires lawyers, parents, custody evaluators and judges to be affected by the same horrifying case everyone else has been watching.
Picture a completely ordinary woman in Ohio, Texas, California or Pennsylvania. She gives birth, develops severe postpartum anxiety and begins experiencing intrusive thoughts that scare the s**t out of her, so she does exactly what we’ve spent years telling women to do and talks about them.
Maybe she tells her OB and starts seeing a psychiatrist. Maybe she takes medication or checks herself into a hospital because she realizes she needs more help than her family can provide, gets better and goes back to raising her kids.
Five years later, her marriage implodes and those records are suddenly interesting again. The treatment that once demonstrated responsibility can now be described as a “history of psychiatric problems” by somebody whose current goal is getting more custody.
And let’s not pretend every custody fight involves two reasonable adults politely trying to determine what’s best for Junior. Sometimes one of them wants to hurt the other one, and “she once told a psychiatrist she was afraid she might hurt the baby” is a nuclear fu***ng weapon if you strip away everything that came before and after it.
She took psychiatric medication and was hospitalized. She once reported frightening intrusive thoughts involving her child, and every one of those facts can be completely true while still telling us almost nothing about whether she’s a dangerous parent today.
Put them together in a nasty custody motion, though, and they sound terrifying. Add an attorney who knows how to sell fear and suddenly we’re doing Minority Report in family court, trying to determine what somebody might do someday based on the darkest thoughts she had during a medical crisis years ago.
And this is where the Clancy case can really f**k things up. Postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety and postpartum psychosis aren’t interchangeable labels for the same thing, and treating them that way would be both medically stupid and potentially devastating for women who need help.
Postpartum psychosis is rare, while depression and anxiety surrounding pregnancy and childbirth are considerably more common. Intrusive thoughts also aren’t the same thing as plans or intentions, which is a pretty fu***ng important distinction when we’re talking about whether someone should lose time with her children.
Unfortunately, contentious divorce isn’t exactly famous for nuance. Attorneys are paid to make the strongest case for their clients, and a psychiatric history stripped of context can become the family-court version of My Cousin Vinny: “I shot the clerk?” sounds pretty fu***ng terrible until you hear the rest of the conversation.
That’s the danger with pulling a diagnosis, hospitalization or intrusive thought out of years of medical records and dropping it into a custody fight. The underlying facts haven’t changed, but the way they’re presented sure as hell can.
Now put yourself in the judge’s chair. One parent says Mom has been stable for years, while the other hands you records showing psychiatric medication, hospitalization or disturbing thoughts following childbirth.
The judge doesn’t have to believe she’s another Lindsay Clancy for the case to matter. The judge only has to wonder what happens if everybody saying she’s safe turns out to be wrong, because nobody wants to be the judge whose custody order becomes part of the next unimaginable tragedy.
There’s an ugly imbalance built into that decision, too. If a judge is overly cautious and unnecessarily restricts a mother’s custody for six months, chances are CNN isn’t showing up at the courthouse and nobody outside that family ever learns the judge’s name.
If the judge decides the mother is safe and something horrific happens, everybody learns the judge’s name. The custody order gets pulled, every warning sign gets reconstructed with the benefit of hindsight, and people start asking how the hell anyone could have allowed those children to be there.
And that’s the problem with cases like this. Nobody remembers the 100,000 times nothing happened; everybody remembers three dead children in Duxbury.
There are absolutely legitimate reasons for courts to consider a parent’s mental health. If someone is actively psychotic, suicidal, violent or otherwise incapable of safely caring for a child, protecting that child has to come first and pretending otherwise would be insane.
But there’s a massive difference between evaluating someone’s current ability to safely parent and treating the existence of a diagnosis as evidence of dangerousness. The questions should be about what is happening now, how the person is functioning, whether treatment has worked and what the person’s actual history as a parent looks like.
American family courts already wrestle with exactly how far mental-health privacy extends once custody becomes contested, and the answer isn’t the same everywhere. Some states are considerably more willing than others to find that a parent’s mental health has been put at issue, which means the hypothetical fear of treatment records someday becoming part of custody litigation isn’t completely pulled out of thin air.
That distinction matters because there is another potential consequence here that’s even worse than an unfair custody ruling. Women may simply stop telling the truth.
Imagine being a new mother sitting across from your doctor while you’re experiencing horrible intrusive thoughts. You don’t want those thoughts and they scare you precisely because you love your baby, but now your doctor is asking you to say them out loud.
You’re supposed to be honest because that’s how you get help. But maybe your marriage is shaky, you’ve watched the Clancy trial and you’ve heard enough horror stories about divorce court to wonder where that information might eventually end up.
It starts to feel like Elaine trying to escape the “difficult patient” note in her medical chart on Seinfeld. Once something gets written down, good fu***ng luck explaining the context five years later when somebody else is reading it for an entirely different reason.
So maybe you minimize what’s happening and go home without getting the help you actually need. The system designed to encourage women to seek treatment has just created an incentive for the woman who needs treatment to keep her mouth shut.
That’s the unintended consequence worth talking about, and it doesn’t require thousands of women actually losing custody before it becomes a problem. If women simply believe that seeking psychiatric treatment could someday be weaponized against them, the damage starts before anybody ever walks into a courtroom.
That’s particularly f**ked up because the medical establishment is trying to push women in precisely the opposite direction. Doctors are encouraged to screen for mental-health problems during pregnancy and postpartum, and women are supposed to understand that these are medical conditions that can and should be treated.
Lindsay Clancy is an extraordinary case involving circumstances almost impossible to comprehend. Whatever anyone ultimately believes about her criminal responsibility, she cannot become the mental picture America associates with every mother experiencing postpartum depression, anxiety, OCD, intrusive thoughts or a successfully treated psychiatric crisis.
For years we’ve told new mothers that postpartum mental illness is medical, treatable and nothing to hide. We’ve told them that if something feels wrong, the responsible thing to do is tell somebody and get help.
The lesson from Lindsay Clancy cannot become that women should think twice before telling the truth about postpartum mental illness. Because the mother who decides it’s safer to lie to her doctor than risk creating Exhibit A in some divorce that may never happen isn’t safer, and neither are her kids.
